“As I heal, may I be a source of healing for
others.”
My
Pocket Mantras by Tanaaz Chubb
Since the dawn of man, there have been countless times
when man believed firmly that he was living in the last days. Today, we are
surrounded by unnecessary war in a drama-ridden Western society that seems to
live only for shock value. We are surrounded by money hungry ways that have
shaped a culture to become greedy and never truly happy, always searching for
the next amazing technology to come our way. Big Pharma makes money off
proscribing pills that patients neither need nor benefit from. Global wars are
waged for the money they make and sex has been devalued and turned into
something that has no real worth save an orgasm or two.
Global warming is swept underneath the rug and we run on
little sleep for days on end chasing “the American Dream”. Humanity is
segregated in endless categories, Christian versus Muslim, Gay versus Straight,
Rich versus Poor, Educated versus Uneducated, Black versus White and the list
goes on. The Bible says that angels walk among us. We are blessed with prophets
and prophetesses, poets and teachers, healers and social workers, ministers and
Good Samaritans committed to shining light and leading the way.
The big question remains: are these the last times that
Christians, Egyptians, Mayans, and many other cultures have predicted? How do
we discern the signs of the times? For many Christians, the book of Revelation
is a major go-to for Armageddon-related predictions. Revelation 1:3 states,
“Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are
those who hear and who keep what is written in it; for the time is near
(NRSV)”. These words however were written thousands of years ago. How near is
the time now? The Bibles says that we should “…be not ignorant of this one
thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years
as one day (KJV, 2 Peter 3:8)”. How then shall we know the day or the hour? I
Thessalonians 5:2 says “For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the
Lord will come like a thief in the night (ESV)”.
“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! She has made all
nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication (Revelations 14:8,
NRSV).” How many times has America been likened to Babylon? What nation better
portrays the whore of Babylon than the flailing hegemon of yesteryear? What
merciless violence has she swept like a black plague over the globe? What
lasciviousness has she made commonplace to the general population of Western
thought? How great is her sin? Where is her repentance? The time must be nigh
for America has no more space to take against the eye of the Divine.
It was rumored the Mayans predicted the end of mankind in
2012. However the Mayan calendar was misinterpreted. Archaeologists have
discovered predictions Mayans made far into the future of now. The Mayans had
many calendars and calculated many of their predictions via the Long Count. The
Long Count were cycles that lasted 5,000 years. What the Mayans did predict for
years surrounding 2012 was a rebirth. They predicted the beginning of a new
cycle. The human imagination is vivid and wild and many seem to always be
looking for doomsday endings (National Geographic, December 14th,
2012).
The human mind certainly is entertaining the end of time
on a constant basis. Societal thought is reflected in our movies. We have seen
many movies about asteroids hitting Earth, aliens invading Earth, natural
disasters such as tsunamis and earthquakes destroying Earth. We talk about
magnetic polar shifts on our planet, the possibility of the tectonic plates
shifting again, global warming, and even the reversal of the North and South
pole. The polar ice caps are melting and global warming is real. So again, the
question arises, how do we discern the signs of the times?
Perhaps, the human heart is heavy with guilt. Perhaps,
humankind knows the sins they have committed against the Earth will have to be
faced with retribution. Perhaps, as Chronos ticks faster and Kairos beats
against the human heart like Edgar Allen Poe, we just know time is almost up! Mark
1:15 states, “the time is fulfilled; the kingdom of God is at hand (NRSV)”. In
the Western world one must seek everything all the time. There is never fulfillment.
The “American Dream” is a rat race that will never be satisfied with cheese at
the completion of the maze.
Pamela stated it oh so well in class, “One can become
paralyzed by the nagging question and instead of living in the moment, allowing
the revelation of Kairos to lead you, one can instead sit as though paralyzed
by fear”. Palestine suffers every day the wrath of a conflict thousands of
years ongoing and we the people sit and do next to nothing. We have become
paralyzed by time, paralyzed by money, paralyzed by a system we disapprove of
whole-heartedly but have no earthly idea how to repair.
Exo-colonization has its target locked and its weapon
loaded ready to rape and ruin any people in its way to claiming natural
resources that it has no natural right to. The Witch Craze had the need to make
sure populations were controlled and domesticated at the Dawn of
Imperialization. The Militarization of this Capitalism driven system has cried
“War On!” for far too long. Speed and power have come together as
Dromo-Colonization has taken control of a people too mesmerized by the latest
digital craze to realize they are being distracted from some very serious
matters.
John Collins, in Global
Palestine, speaks against the presumed narrative of progress. The Western
world has this all too obvious dichotomous worldview. Unfortunately, most
people are too busy staring at tiny digital screens walking around these city
streets oblivious to what is actually taking place. Securitization sees the
strategic oppression using social systems and militarization to secure the
domestic colony (endo-colonization). We are caught in multiple perpetual
cycles. We work to spend our entire paychecks on so many things we don’t even
need, as well as state mandated services and expenses that keep us working day
in and day out. We are caught in a perpetual cycle of wars and further
militarization.
The perpetual acceleration for technological advancement
is used as yet another form of societal control. Global Palestine (p. 85) speaks on the psychological disorientation
and the hyper-accelerated violence that the drone of technology chasing can
bring. The middle class has all but ceased to exist. More and more of the
working class is suffering the removal of their agency. More and more the
working class and the truly poor are becoming closer to one another in income
and exposure to benefits that all human beings should know. The removal of
agency is both dehumanizing and intentional.
In the 1960’s, Hannah Arendt wrote about the confliction
between truth and politics. Politicians and lying have always seemed to be
synonymous. The most dangerous part of this is that politicians are supposed to
be our leaders. Who do the people trust if they cannot trust those in charge of
governing their daily existence? Organized lying has been the rewriting of the
tale that became “history”. The victor gets to tell the story. What then in
this world is truth? However, most people are aware that they are being lied
to. Unfortunately, the fabricated lie created on the whim of power if often
more attractive than the actual truth.
In Greek mythology, Thanatos was death personified.
Thanatos is our death instinct. Hannah Arendt focused intensively on the
dispossession of the stateless. More and more refugees wander without state due
to climate change. The deeper we dig into the devastation in this world, the
harder it is to believe that Armageddon is not completely inevitable. The more
we are faced with end of time scenarios that put all we have allowed to take
place on this Earth into perspective.
Chris Hedges writes in The Coming Collapse, : “It is impossible for any doomed population
to grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is on
the eve of implosion”. Without corporate money, the power elite would no longer
hold political power. “They would rather implode the entire system than give up
their positions of privilege (Chris Hedges, The
Coming Collapse)”. Our system is swiftly disintegrating and Chris Hedges is
in no way the only one who sees this coming.
James Baldwin clearly stated his belief that whiteness is
not about color but about mindset. White is the way that led us to corporate
America. White is the system of oppression that led to the one percent. White
is the way that led to the rise of the carceral state, to the New Jim Crow and
to privatized prisons. More and more good men and women keep disappearing off
the city streets. Darkness has all but consumed us. We are swimming through
seas of lies and oppression, lust and legions of demons that call themselves
the leaders of the New World Order.
What if this darkness we
faced was necessary before we could collectively rise to the occasion of the
light? What if what we are racing toward is cataclysmic change?
Hannah Arendt believed in Natality or the chance to be
the spark that begins something new. She believed we as human beings have the
ability to begin again. Tracy Chapman sings that Heaven is here on Earth. The
Bible speaks of the new Heaven and Earth. Anthony Marx in Faith in Nation closes his brilliant work saying that he believed
we must learn from our scars and work hard in order to repair the damages done.
We look around at all the wars we wage, the oppression we live with every day,
the imbalance of a system that was created to enslave and we again ask the
question: how does one discern the signs of the times?
We are standing on the precipice of a catalyst. The
system capitalism has driven for centuries to force oppression and subjugation
is about to collapse. We time lapse as we sit still at stoplights waiting for
the light to change green. Big Pharma is taking over making people more sick
with more symptoms than ever before. Text conversations and staring at flashing
digital screens has spring-loaded the dumbing down of a nation, the dumbing
down of a globe. We wove our terrible tale and the end is drawing quickly near.
We are living in a dark precarious moment. Will we honor
Chronos or Kairos? Will we stand or will we fall? It will take the unification
of us all to rise above the darker elements that have almost completely
engulfed most human hearts. We start but will we finish? Will we be able to
diminuendo down the sound of our own drowning laughter? This is the disaster
every prophet, every religion, every end of times movie has predicted. This is
our decision to make. I stand with Anthony Marx and Hannah Arendt and every
other forward thinking soul. We have the power, we have the ability, we have
the creative strength to heal our scars and create for us all a better
tomorrow. May the Mayans be right. May this be our new beginning.
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